Kwek Leng Beng, Chairman of Millennium & Copthorne Hotels, has had tremendous success owning and renovating some of the world's greatest historic hotels. The Galeria at the Millennium Biltmore Long before construction of the Millennium Biltmore, proclaimed as a "monument to the growth and prosperity of the city," could begin it had to be designed. And on December 17, 1921, architects-designers Schultze and Weaver began what the media of the time called "one of the brightest stars in the firmament of local enterprise." It certainly promised to be and become the largest construction project in the history of Los Angeles. Influenced heavily by Italian and Spanish Renaissance architecture, the architectural firm of Schultze and Weaver blueprinted the hotel in just 47 days. The partnership of Leonard Schultze and S. Fullerton Weaver had left indelible work in New York with the Waldorf Astoria in 1931, and also on other grand Gotham projects. The Millennium Biltmore was the firm's first major commission, but had the blessing of John McEntee Bowman, a Canadian-born hotelier who was the founding president of Bowman-Biltmore hotel, built in New York in 1913. Bowman, who had silent movie star good looks himself was coming into one of the leading Hotel names in the world. Ward Morehouse III's love affair with grand hotels began long before he wrote his first landmark book, The Waldorf-Astoria: America's Gilded Dream, which was followed by Inside the Plaza: An Intimate Portrait of the Ultimate Hotel. His father, the late drama critic Ward Morehouse, lovingly introduced his son to the glamorous life of luxurious hotels. He is a former staff correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, Broadway columnist for the New York Post and author of nine other books and two plays, The Actors and If It Was Easy, produced Off-Broadway.

This chronicle of the multifaceted Bhopal campaign against two of the world's most powerful chemical corporations, Union Carbide and Dow Chemical Co. (which now owns Union Carbide), parallels the emergence of public understanding of environmental safety and corporate accountability that Bhopal helped to create.Written at the 20th anniversary, the Reader includes primary source documents of this evolution. In 1984, the deadly pesticide used in Bhopal and in the United States was hailed by agro-business as part of its "revolution." A valuable reference text for industrial accidents and corporate crimes as well as a handbook for research, prevention and activism, the collection includes gripping first person stories of some of the 200,000 permanently-injured survivors, activists, journalists, scientists, doctors, government and corporate officials. This anthology brings together never-before published testimonies, archival documents translated from Hindi, legal and scientific evidence and commentary, social analysis, even corporate perspectives on liability, and web debates, with comprehensive introductions for each aspect of the disaster. The Bhopal Reader documents forces that are even now bringing Bhopali women to the very doors of the corporation in protest. Some 21 years later, the drinking water is contaminated because Union Carbide never cleaned up its abandoned factory with bags of stored chemicals, causing genetic damage to yet another generation from the deadly methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas. The book reports on the international Bhopal campaign being waged today by survivors, activists, lawyers, doctors - in India, the U.S., Britain and elsewhere around the world - for compensation for all the Bhopal victims. It takes its readers across continents, into newspapers, television stations, websites, courtrooms, shareholders annual meetings, campuses, and chemical plants. The Bhopal Reader presents a valuable case study of the complexities of fighting for justice in a world increasingly overrun by the politics of corporate rule under globalization. Its voices herald the dialogues that will dominate this new century and The Bhopal Reader is the indispensable guide to understanding them.